OBAMA

On 4 November 2008, Barack Obama, a first generation Black American with a Kenyan father, became the 44th (and 1st Black) President of the United States: an event I'd never imagined to see in my lifetime. The world, for both Black and White, is changed forever. Now, anything, literally, is possible. No longer the need, as with Martin Luther King, to "dream". No longer can anyone say a non-White is incapable.

Rosa Parks taught us to claim any school as a right. Mohammed Ali taught us to have pride in ourselves - "Black is beautiful". Martin Luther King taught us to dream. Tiger Woods broke through a bastion of whiteness (golf), as did Lewis Hamilton (F1). Buy Obama has revolutionized our world. Whatever the fortuitous set of circumstances making his victory possible (disillusionment with the Republicans and Iraq, the economy, age), the fact remains he did it: less than 8 years from joining the American political scene as a Senator... and a mere step away from roots in a village in Kenya!

Only in America: it truly is the modern country (if the condition of modernity is the ability to re-invent yourself). And, in the process, restoring faith in the notion of democracy.

The hard part begins now, when he assumes office. Buy it matters little. He'd delivered a symbol to a world hitherto dominated by white Europeans. The tectonic plates are shifting as we live.